What ho! A podcasting we did go. And a merry old blah blah something. Jim and John squeezed into the RPS telephone box to record a new podcast, where we not only mentioned subjects, but then went on to discuss them. Amongst that which exited our mouth was the nature of open world gaming, easter eggs in The Dig, why Bookworm Adventures was great, and what defines an MMO.

Jim’s been playing lots of GTA IV and Far Cry 2, while John’s been dwelling in the past with the likes of The Dig. Both have THINGS to say about them. But there’s other more important matters, like, hey, why are dustbins called dustbins? And why is RPS the number one search result for their origins. Find out how John cheated at Boggle! Find out how little Jim cares about Bookworm Adventures! Hear us discuss Scott Kevill’s Game Ranger!

There’s our important thoughts on the silly release schedules of silly publishers for the PC. There’s pondering on the prospects of Natal for PC. There’s supposition over the state of Alan Wake for the PC. It’s about PC games, see! Also a couple of words on the futuristic worlds where no one needs consoles or powerful computers. And then we meander aimlessly through the definition of the MMO. It’s all just bloody brilliant.

You people should discuss THINGS regularly. Perhaps in a bi-weekly format that is shared over the internets. You could name it a podcast (if that’s your sort of thing). A shame that it’ll never catch on though.

I look forward to hearing your ramblings. Of course, the London branch of RPS are so much ramblier. And nasal-y. And navel-gasing-y.

Serondal, Jalf, Google localizes your search results depending on where you are doing the search from and your language settings, which is incredibly annoying and goes against my vision of what the internet should be.

Are you logged in to Google when you search for origin of dustbin? Maybe they just remember that you like RPS, and since they can’t find anything helpful, they just link you to a site you like.

And Gaikai will have to work now. Because if it only works in 10 years, it will be completely outdated. At that point you will likely have quad cores and high end graphic cards in your cellphone. And I don’t expect there will be many developers who will use any more powerful hardware than what we use now. Most developers now seem happy with what hardware was like 5 years ago.

The problem with Cloud Computing solutions to gaming is that the number of users scales badly with “centralised” resources (which is the irony about the use of the word “Cloud” to describe them). All the clever solutions to mass processing are now moving to BOINC style distributed processing, which is more like “p2p compute”, or a compute equivalent of what Skype does. So.
(And Sagan is quite right, “10 years in the future” technology should be so good that everyone will be able to afford a cheap machine, or cellphone, that can play basically any reasonable game. Honestly, even modern cellphones are pretty awesome…)

GTA IV – cinematic! What?! Personally I thought that was the most disapointing aspect of the gameplay. The world is very cinematic but the events so small and localized. Best example being the bank hiest. Soon as the Irish dude said bank robbery I emmediately thought Heat! 6 cars outside the bank and running down back alleys and underground routes. Heat’s bank robbery is cinematic. GTA IV’s is so… small.

Also that happy crack chappy who gives you $100 is part of the random character system. The random characters show up as a man shaped icon on the mini-map and trigger little side missions when approached. The chap in question has two or three further missions if you find him again.

ah, the Dig, i loved that game so much, i loved the music, the characters, exploring the weird alien planet thinking all the time “wth is that!?” and yet the puzzles weren’t *that* impossibly obscure……….. then one day i finished it………. the ending was sooooooooooooooo bad, the big “mystery” was so incredible stupid that it took all that love and turned into burning HATE! -_-

I haven’t played Far Cry 2, but the way you describe NPCs not telling you stuff of you turn away from them reminds me of SWAT 1. If you tried clicking to skip a cutscene an FMV of an instructor lecturing you, he’d get annoyed and start over from the beginning.

I guess some developer somewhere was rubbing his hands in glee about how immersive it would be, but I can live with a game reminding me it’s a game if it means I can get on with it.